Tomorrow I get to see my best friend.

Its been twenty months since I’ve seen her… the longest span of time since 1993 when we first met in the ETBU cafeteria.

We met, hit it off, and in the fall of 1993 when she asked me to move into her three-person dorm room with her and another girl for the spring semester, I jumped at the chance.

We had a blast.

Mostly.

That was the semester of my first big breakup, the semester that we ate our weight in Little Debbie snack cakes (hello, Freshman Fifteen…), the semester we reveled in the freedom of going to WalMart or Whataburger in the middle of the night just because we could, the semester we lived on the edge by breaking the sacred Baptist University curfew designed to keep its young ladies pure and climbed in the dorm room window after 10:00pm one time too many, and the semester we shared clothes, Pretty Woman, Grease and City Slickers videos, and a Salt ‘n Pepa CD. I wanna shoop, baby…

AND of course 4Him and Truth CDs. We were good Baptist girls, after all.

We developed a fondness for Cookie Company cookies and Diet Cokes. And Sonic Happy Hour. (Did I mention Freshman Fifteen?)

We named our cars Bessie (hers) and Calvin (mine).

I went home with her to 9911 Ebb Street many a weekend, and felt right at home playing Rummikub and eating seafood with her family… until that day I dented her brother’s Camaro door… oops.

We were closer than friends… we were like sisters.

I still laugh at some of those memories…

But there were tears, too.

That first semester we lived together marked my first major breakup, from my junior college boyfriend (that was probably the first time I cursed… on the phone with him, and I wasn’t even embarrassed that my roommates heard it).

But then cursing quickly became funny, so we’d take turns saying “screw you!” just to shock each other. Because that was THE WORST, vilest, most shocking phrase any of us knew.

Then there was the time we both had a crush on the same guy. But neither of us ended up with him.

We both lost grandparents the same week one fall.

We had boyfriend drama and roommate drama and roommate’s boyfriend drama.

Like all sisters do, we had our share of, ahem, disagreements. We once went over a month not speaking to each other. And I remember EXACTLY why, but that’s not a story for the blog. I was wrong, and I’ll just leave it at that.

But we forgave each other and stayed friends.

We lived together until she graduated in 1995.

She moved home and got a job and traded Bessie for a new Honda Civic, and we talked on the phone almost every day.

Then I graduated a year later and moved home and got a job and traded Calvin for a used Toyota Camry, and we still talked on the phone almost every day.

We were in each other’s weddings.

At each other’s baby showers.

Had our first babies within months of each other. And I still have a ten-year-old picture of us pregnant together in a picture frame that says, “Through Thick and Thin.”

We’ve spent countless hours shopping, eating Mexican food, and shopping.

And eating Mexican food.

When my husband was diagnosed with encephalitis and we weren’t sure if he would live through it, she drove four hours to help me clean my house and get ready for him to come home from the ICU and for the throngs of visitors who would inevitably be arriving.

We’ve been there for each other.

More her than me. WAY more her than me.

I can’t imagine my life without her. She’s been a better friend to me than I’ve deserved, on more occasions than I can count, over the past seventeen years.

I’m grateful for her friendship more than I can put into words.

I haven’t seen her in twenty months.

And I’m dying for a Cookie Company Cookie and Diet Coke.